Autumn. In the Okanagan Okanogan, it would be nothing without sumac. In the East, the maple trees and sumacs turn red and the sun burns on the face of the earth. We […]
Glorious Sumac
Mariposa Lily: an Indigenous Food Crop Reborn
In open agriculture, indigenous crops take their rightful place as efficient water farmers on dry hillsides. One of the most beautiful of these crops is the mariposa lily. In most parts of […]
Water Farming
Yesterday, I introduced the concept of Open Agriculture: a form of agriculture that works with the forms and processes of the land and unites very different settler and indigenous forms of cultivation. Today, […]
Open Agriculture, Day 1
Welcome to the idea of Open Agriculture, farming for the future made in cooperation with the planet. I have been collecting seeds and making notes about new crops for the coming drought […]
Making the Future
Here’s the old story: Indigenous peoples lived for thousands of years in the West, surviving by hunting and gathering, often in abject poverty, until settlers came from the United States, Canada, and […]
Look Both Ways!
Brought a friend home from the road beside the hawthorns. Last spring, he neglected to look left and right. Sheesh. Magpie, Disassembled I hate it when my friends get like this. Still, […]
Ripening the Sun
A friend asked how I knew when my green zebra tomatoes were ripe, when I’d never grown them before and they were green when they began and green when they ended. Good […]
No Place to Spawn
When the salmon of the Okanagan River come home over eleven dams on their year-long journey from Siberia… …they can’t spawn in their traditional home, the Skaha and Okanagan Lake Systems, because […]
Thanksgiving Salmon
I give thanks that the salmon have returned from Siberia to the Okanagan River, after the longest journey of any salmon in the world… And I grieve that their journey ends abruptly […]
That Old Watery Moon: A Year of Walking and Learning
Moon’s hanging around all day now. Frost in the tomatoes by the lower fence. Potatoes in the cellar. Light everywhere. Earth and Moon with Human Signature Humans are life. They love views […]
